Abstract

Wirelessly-enabled sensing technologies offer the hope of enabling economically and socially important applications including intelligent transportation systems and other so-called smart city initiatives, home automation, improvements in manufacturing, and tools for humanitarian assistance and disaster response. Importantly, the value may only be realizable through the integration of a number of dis-similar, separately-built, separately-owned, and separately-controlled sensing sub-systems.  Our research at CMU over the last five years has aimed to create, deploy and validate a framework that addresses key challenges that arise in such a system-of-systems.

In this talk, we present some outcomes from this project. We begin with an examination of practical barriers in a typical IoT application. From this, we develop themes related to low-power operation, programmability, synchronization, federation, and the interplay between them. Within this context, we discuss (1) a new language framework, called TTPython, that seeks to ease the programmer's burden in creating software for such complex, heterogeneous, distributed, fault-prone systems, (2) an overlay architecture for IoT devices that makes them a suitable compilation target for TTPython, (3) compilation and mapping concepts, and (4) a systems demonstration.

Bio

Bob Iannucci is a Distinguished Engineer at Google.  Previously, he was Director of the CyLab Mobility Research Center and a Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He retains a Courtesy Adjunct appointment at CMU. Previously, he served as Chief Technology Officer of Nokia and Head of Nokia Research Center. Bob’s current research interests include low-power systems architectures, mobile networks, large-scale sensor networks, and emergency communications. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1988.

Before joining Cisco in 1999, Flavio Bonomi was at AT&T Bell Labs, with architecture and research responsibilities, mostly relating to the evolution of the ATM technology, and then was Principal Architect at two Silicon Valley startups, ZeitNet and StratumOne.

He received an Electrical Engineering degree from Pavia University in Italy, and a Master’s and PhD in Electrical Engineering degrees in 1981 and 1985, respectively, from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.